Weeks 901 and 902

Weeks beginning Mon 20 and 27 Apr.

Happy International Workers’ Day!

NHS Vaccinations

Our work with Good Machine on the Vaccinations in Schools project has continued to keep us busy. We’ve been focussed on improving the performance of CSV imports. Chris and James have been adding instrumentation to the current process so that we have some visibility of the effect of any changes we make. Misha and I have been refactoring the existing code to make it easier to make some performance improvements we’ve got in mind.

I’m slowly getting my head around all the different communication channels in use and which ones we need to pay attention to.

I’ve spent a bit of time along the way improving my dev vm setup for the project so that I can setup/teardown dev VMs using Multipass. I’m enjoying using Byobu again as an interface over the standard tmux that I’ve been using for a while. I remember switching to Byobu when I first discovered Multipass and cloud-init but no longer remember why I switched away again.

Chris and I spent an enjoyable day in the Good Machine office last week. Despite all the advances in remote working and having my own comfortable office I do still value the opportunity to work together in person.

Nesta

We agreed that we’re unfortunately not in a position to take on more work on Nesta’s Visit a Heat Pump given our commitment to Good Machine. Instead, we caught up with Seb and suggested that he might be a good person to work on it.

Jam

Chris and I had another chat with Nicola to discuss how she can support us with Jam while we’re not in a position to actively work on it. Nicola’s agreed to help with the Jam-related music event being planned for June (see weeks 893 and 900 for more). Chris and the rest of the organisers had another productive meeting about it this week and it sounds as though the agenda is really starting to take shape.

Code Club

I got the children to create Scratch student accounts in the Code Club session this week. I’ve been holding off because I’m slightly nervous about additional responsibilities for moderating any comments they leave. In the end it felt like the potential additional overhead was worthwhile because they’ve been creating some great projects that they’ve had to throw away at the end of each lesson. They’ll now be able to continue working on them over multiple weeks.

Until next time.

– Chris